Film Commentary by Alex Good

Evil — In a Time of Heroes (2009)

*. There was some potential here. Not much, but some.
*. A zombie movie set in Athens (Greece, not Georgia) in the wake of the global financial crisis, with echoes of the classical past playing in the background. It might have worked.
*. Well, it sure doesn’t. This is one of the worst zombie movies ever made, and that’s not a very high bar being set.
*. It seems to have no story at all. There’s a countdown to a bombardment that inter-titles pop up to remind us of, but we don’t know what that’s referring to and nobody in the film seems aware of or at least concerned about it until near the end. What’s even more annoying, however, is the fact that none of the characters has anything to do, or anything they want to do. Nothing happens for a reason. This makes the action (a word I’ll use instead of story) completely incoherent.
*. Unforunately, the only way to really appreciate how scattered and confused a film this is, is to watch the whole thing, which is something I strongly advise against. It starts off bad and doesn’t get any better.
*. Actually, it starts off where Evil (2005) left off. Yes, this terrible movie is a sequel! But don’t think that having seen Evil will help you out very much with this one.
*. Apparently all the actors were unpaid volunteers, and in this case the filmmakers got what they paid for. None of the characters are memorable, or even distinguishable aside from their different uniforms (the well-dressed cook, the hero in the soccer jersey, the soldiers, Billy Zane as a Jedi cowboy). They also have an annoying habit of dying and coming back to life, and I don’t mean as zombies. This is all part of the incoherence I mentioned earlier, the sense that from one scene to the next there is no dramatic continuity, or really connection of any kind.
*. There’s a lot of blood splashed on faces and walls. This seems to be the film’s only purpose, or justification. I wouldn’t call the gore anything special though, as it’s mainly delivered by way of rapid editing with some CGI assists. In other words, the usual fare.
*. Maybe if they’d climbed up the Acropolis and had a battle royale among the ruins it might have been more interesting . . . but not by much. Really, you don’t want to waste your time with this.